In a client-server computing system, a computer application or program that is running on one computer (i.e., the server) may be accessible to another computer (i.e., the client) over a network, such as over the Internet. The user interface running on the server is exposed and visible to the client. In this way, the client has remote access to the server and the user of the client device can interact with the application that is running on the server.
The server application may be, for example, an application that processes two-dimensional (2D) and/or three-dimensional (3D) graphics. In this example, a 2D and/or 3D graphics application may be used to render graphical objects on a computer display. Currently, in a client-server computing system, the high-level graphics representation (e.g., Direct3D, OpenGL) is reduced to an image (e.g., a bitmap image) at the server. The image is then transmitted from the server to the client over the network. Once received at the client, the image is rendered on the client display. Creating, compressing, and transmitting these image files may result in high CPU utilization (i.e., computing load) at the server, especially when the application displays objects in motion and when there are a large number of remote users sharing the server. Further, images are often large and, therefore, transmitting images to a large number of remote users consumes a large amount of network bandwidth.
While previous client-server computing systems have addressed the aforementioned problems by directing graphics commands (instead of images) to clients requesting remote access to 3D graphics applications on a server, such systems have generally assumed that server and client 3D graphics libraries may differ in only platform-specific extensions or library version (e.g., OpenGL 1.4 v. OpenGL 1.2).